# Migrating from MyISAM to INNODB while minimizing downtime

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/migrating-from-myisam-to-innodb-while-minimizing-downtime/462>\
**Category:** Other MySQL® Questions\
**Created:** [September 24, 2007, 10:52pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/migrating-from-myisam-to-innodb-while-minimizing-downtime/462 "2007-09-24T22:52:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![untenable](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/a183cd/32.png) [@untenable](https://forums.percona.com/u/untenable)\
**Post date:** [September 24, 2007, 10:52pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/migrating-from-myisam-to-innodb-while-minimizing-downtime/462/1 "2007-09-24T22:52:30Z")

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I need to migrate two 5GB MyISAM tables to Innodb tables. What’s the best way to do this while minimizing downtime?

It takes several hours even on a quad proc 8GB RAM box to load a 5GB MyISAM mysqldump as a INNODB tables.

And this is with several optimizations including these:

-Increasing the innodb\_buffer\_pool\_size to 4GB  
-SET UNIQUE\_CHECKS=0

My questions:

1. What other performance optimizations can I perform?
2. How do I do this to minimize downtime. What I was thinking is that I’d take a mysqldump, copy it to another server and import the database tables as Innodb tables.

Once the import is complete, I would do a diff between the previous mysqldump and the current live database, copy and import the diff into the other DB Server.

Is this possible?  
I was looking online and could not find a way to do this “diff + import only the diff” thing.